Birders thrilled at rare sighting in Broward

South American cardinal turns up in Plantation park

Plantation — Barbara DeWitt has gazed at thousands of exotic birds in her 30 years of traveling the globe as an amateur ornithologist.

But nothing prepared her for the unwitting discovery of a Red-capped Cardinal - a bird never before photographed in the continental United States - about a mile from her home.

On a Saturday stroll through the Plantation Preserve Golf Course and Linear Park last month, DeWitt and a group of fellow bird watchers noticed the cardinal, which is commonly found in Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Brazil and Bolivia.

At first glance, a friend dismissed the bird as a wren, but DeWitt peered through her binoculars for a closer look. She froze.

"I knew immediately that it was something really different ... with its red head, black back and white chest," said DeWitt, 59, a retired flight attendant. "I said, 'Holy smokes.' I called my husband and told him to come over and take a photo right away."

From its perch on some reeds in the wetlands about 30 feet away, the bird paused briefly as the shutter clicked and the binoculars made the rounds among the slack-jawed group.

That evening DeWitt and her husband, Allen J. Hartman, posted a message on tropicalaudubon.org, the Tropical Audubon Society's Web site, touching off a ripple of chatter in the birding community.

"The discovery of the bird was a wonderful surprise," said Patrice Sonnelitter, a member of the city's Landscape Architecture Department, which organized the bird-watching walk. "This is a gift to have this kind of thing in the middle of the city."

Larry Connor agreed. Connor is a biological scientist in the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission's Habitat and Species Conservation Division.

"I was a little surprised because it is so unusual," he said.

Connor logged the Red-capped Cardinal's appearance in the commission's exotic species database, an internal list detailing statewide sightings of exotic fish, birds, reptiles and mammals. Experts determined the bird was an adult, although its gender could not be discerned from the photos.

The recent sighting is the first time the bird has been photographed in the wild in the continental United States, said Bill Pranty, a member of the Florida Ornithological Society and an expert on the species. The last time the crimson-headed cardinal appeared in the wild was in the early 1960s in Key Biscayne, but it was never photographed, Pranty said.

Red-capped Cardinals rarely wander from one place and experts can only guess how the bird wound up in the Plantation park near Broward Boulevard and Southwest 65th Avenue.

Pranty and Connor surmised it escaped or was intentionally turned loose - a less significant discovery than, say, a bird from a foreign country that loses its way.

Torn from its natural habitat and lacking a mate, the cardinal's prospects for survival in Plantation are slim, Pranty said. Then again, Pranty said, the bird's behavior invoked fundamental instincts.

"It recognizes it needs to do something to keep from getting eaten because it was roosting with other birds, and there is safety in numbers," said Pranty, author of A Birder's Guide to Florida.

The sighting comes one month after a yellow-bellied bananaquit that is rarely seen in the United States sparked a fuss in Hollywood.